We are a new food blog, and no self-respecting food blog should get past the first couple of days without a picture of a) some food; or b) a menu, so here you go.

It is a rather grand menu (pdf), isn't it, and not usually the sort that interests me. The words are both in French and italics which suggests a high poncyness quotient. But then it is a menu from Le Gavroche, London's greatest classical French restaurant and these things come with the territory.

I mention it because, just as this blog is being born, Le Gavroche - the first in Britain to receive one, two and then three Michelin stars - is celebrating its 40th birthday. In a desperately febrile business, that is an event worth marking, not simply because of the joint's grandeur or its history or the fact that it serves one of the best value high-end lunches in London (46 pounds a head including half a bottle of wine and water each, as well as coffee and petit fours) but for grand bourgeois cooking and even grander service.

Le Gavroche matters because of the people who have worked there. Without the restaurant, and the patronage of brothers Michel and Albert Roux, the thriving British restaurant scene as we know it would look completely different. Its alumni include Rowley Leigh, Marco Pierre White, Gordon Ramsay and Marcus Wareing, among others. Each in turn has trained a new set of cooks who have gone on to set up their own restaurants, many of them much more modest affairs than the mother ship.

For example after leaving Le Gavroche Rowley Leigh helped pioneer a brand of smart but unfussy modern British food at Kensington Place, which has defined a whole genre of mid market restaurants in Britain (his new place, due to open in the Autumn in London's Bayswater, is eagerly awaited).

And though he may now be the clown prince of gastronomy, there is no doubting that Pierre White inspired an entire generation of cooks to give it a go. As for Ramsay - well, we all know enough about him.

Curiously, while Le Gavroche has done wonders to modernise the British restaurant world, the restaurant itself has stayed true to its beginnings. Under Albert's son Michel Roux Jnr the food has lightened a little, but remains in touch with its classical roots.

The spectacular lunch that I attended to mark its 40th was a perfect example: a fabulous fat Scottish scallop with a little ginger; turbot roasted on the bone followed by guinea fowl with a creamy sauce of morels that Escoffier would himself have recognised. The wines were extraordinary too, including an '89 Latour and a number - Chateaus Mouton Rothschild and Climens - from 1967. Welcome to my wonderful life.

The guest list for this party was also interesting: not just hacks invited, it seems, on the basis that you must keep your friends close and your enemies closer still, but also former cooks from the restaurant, suppliers and customers whose decades of loyalty deserved to be rewarded with a truly free lunch.

It was a class act, much like the restaurant. Which explains why its is possibly the only high end place in London I return to, and for which - wait for it - I save up to spend my own money. As outside of the lunch menu a meal here is nose-bleedingly expensive - think 100 pounds a head, easy - you can take that as a recommendation.